legal sanity

A few weeks back, I wrote about the importance of creating a connection culture in the law . One of the best ways for law firms to create connecting points for their lawyers is to gain insight into points of disconnection. As I’ve previously noted, two frequently cited causes of lawyer disconnect are the competitive nature of the business and long working hours.

According to a post from Chris Bailey at the always-interesting Bailey Workplay blog, another major cause is invisibility. Bailey attributes this problem to incompetent leadership. Specifically, he asserts that managers can do a lot of damage when they ignore employees. Ignoring actions, in turn, can take different forms, including:

• Not acknowledging contributions
• Not recognizing expertise
• Not seeing the individual worth
  

As this post from Matt Homann suggests, anxiety can also promote lawyer disconnection. Homann points to a Harvard Business article that tells us How to Deal with Anxious People. The piece leads with an anatomical fact: When we’re anxious, our minds constrict and we’re more apt to cut off our rationality and act impulsively. Consequently, law firm leaders looking to alleviate anxiety – and the disconnection it can foster – need to talk to or with anxious lawyers rather than at or over them.

The article goes on to instruct that the best way to navigate these challenging talks is to observe the anxious person’s body language. People who feel that they’re being talked over will “leave the conversation at the earliest opportunity.” When they’re talked at, people tend to tuck their chin down or stick it out to show that they’re intimidated or ticked off, respectively. By contrast, when you talk to an anxious person, they’ll “nod from the neck up.” Similarly, someone who senses that they’re being talked with will usually relax their shoulders and neck, “as if you've told them: ‘It'll be okay. We can work this out.’”

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In past posts, I’ve discussed the broken windows theory as it relates to the practice of law and, more specifically, to the creation and cure of client service problems. In a nutshell, the theory holds that firms should focus on identifying and quickly repairing their broken windows – those aspects of their operation that signal an indifference to client satisfaction.

As this Small Firm Business article conveys, law firms looking to stem client dissatisfaction - and the attrition it can compel – often conduct client surveys. The surveys are drafted and administered to obtain feedback about:

• Clients' satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the attorneys and staff who served them

• The timeliness, responsiveness and value of work performed

• The need for additional services and greater cost or quality control

• The need for greater lawyer specialization

• Whether clients would use the firm again and refer the firm to friends and associates

As the article suggests, it’s a fairly futile and wasteful for firms to undertake these surveys if they don’t follow-up and redress the client service issues brought to light.

To bridge this gap between intelligence gathering and action, some firms are “creating specific positions to facilitate and organize communication between major firm clients and the attorneys representing them.” That’s the message in a recent article from The Recorder featured at law.com.

Led by client service executives with titles like Chief of Practice Excellence; law firm client relations teams “provide attorneys with news on the clients' activities and goals, serve as point people for clients with questions or issues and help attorneys maintain regular contact with clients.”

It would be interesting to compare the client opinion on firms embracing this team approach with the client perception of firms that do little or nothing to inspect and repair their broken windows.

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A little while back, I wrote a post on creating a more fulfilling legal career. It conveyed my thoughts on a New York Times article describing the diminishing lure of the law.

One of the resonant complaints I hear from lawyers is that they feel very disconnected from their colleagues and firms. They attribute their sense of isolation to, among other things, the competitive nature of the business and long working hours. These kinds of complaints inspired me to write posts like:

• fostering connecting points for employee engagement

• connecting with others – a key lawyering skill

• making the connection: engagement, evangelism and experience management

Their common theme is connection – the damage caused by its absence and ways to build it in the legal profession.

Connection is also the theme of a new ChangeThis manifesto by leadership expert Michael Lee Stallard. Titled The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage (pdf), the manifesto poses the compelling question: What is it about connection that makes it so powerful?

Stallard offers up this gem of an answer:

“[W]e are humans, not machines. We have emotions. We have hopes and dreams. We have a conscience. We have deeply felt human needs to be respected, to be recognized for our talents, to belong. [ ] When we work in an environment that recognizes these realities of our human nature, we thrive. [ ] When we work in an environment that fails to recognize this, it is damaging to our mental and physical health.”

He then explains and explores the core elements of a workplace Connection Culture:

• Vision (“everyone in an organization is motivated by the organization’s mission, united by its values, and proud of its reputation”)

• Value (“everyone in an organization understands the universal nature of people, appreciates the unique contribution of each person, and helps them achieve their potential”)

• Voice (“everyone in an organization participates in an open, honest and safe environment where people share their opinions in order to understand one another and seek the best ideas”)

Stallard aids our understanding, and amplifies his message, by giving examples of businesses and business leaders who have successfully embraced these core components.

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In the last several years, I’ve logged a lot of online and offline hours learning, thinking and teaching about work-life synergy for lawyers (pdf). Although different issues converge under this umbrella, one topic that garners a lot of attention is flexible work options. It’s something I’ve addressed in posts on:

• Becoming more flexible

• Flexible work for lawyers 
  

• The flexible law firm: reality or pipe dream?

About a month ago, I came across a boston.com article on workplace trends for 2008. In it, columnist Maggie Jackson declares: “Fluidity is in. Piecemeal flexing is out.” She’s referring to a movement in corporate America to retrain the focus away from flexible work programs and towards the more fluid “Mass Career Customization" (MCC).

Championed by Cathleen Benko of Deloitte & Touche, MCC presumes that, today, more and more employees want to tailor their careers by “periodically adjusting their work pace, job setting and schedule, workload, and company role.”

After reading the article, I went over to Deloitte’s website and continued my MCC studies through a podcast that explores how MCC is not just a women’s initiative. Given the emergence of a dual-centric workforce, career customization serves the needs of men and women alike. I also vetted this series of in-house articles on Building a Lattice Organization. (The MCC model can be visualized as a career lattice - with numerous paths leading to different kinds of success – as opposed to a career ladder.)

In the wake of this education, I started considering the ways MCC might play out in the legal profession. Law firms aren't known for being early adopters of new workplace trends. That’s why it was so interesting to read a recent New York Times article – aptly titled Who’s Cuddly Now? Law Firms – that profiles a new proposal to bring customized career tracks to the law.

The proposal, called FACTS, is the brainchild of work-life consultant Deborah Epstein Henry. Henry doesn’t propose that firms do away with the billable hour. Rather, she suggests that they move from a liner to a more fluid billable hour model that recognizes how lawyers’ work-life needs may change at different stages of their careers. The acronym FACTS reflects the variety of work hour modes that Henry envisions:

• Fixed

• Annualized

• Core

• Targeted

• Shared

To learn more about the FACTS, you can read Henry’s article outlining her methodology (pdf). Those of you in the New York area can join in the conversation when Henry presents her program on Monday, March 3, 2008. To learn more about the program and register for it, visit Flex-Time Lawyers.

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It’s probably no mere coincidence that at a time of political challenge and economic uncertainty in the United States, there’s been a flurry of coverage on the subject of … happiness.

For some time now, I’ve been intrigued by the science and study of happiness, as evidenced in this post on the road to lawyer happiness and this one that puts lawyer happiness under the microscope.

So, I eagerly read a pair of recent Christian Science Monitor articles on the subject.

The first piece - titled Actually, Happiness Isn’t Within - challenges the “firmly held and particularly American belief that happiness” is an internal quality; a state of being, or wellbeing, that we cultivate from the inside out. Citing new findings by social scientists, the article asserts that our happiness is a byproduct of external factors. Topping the list of those outside influences “is the quantity and the quality of our relationships.” (Journalist Penelope Trunk echoes this point in a post that offers a few tests for discerning what we need to be happier.)

Given this new happiness formula and the amount of time most of us spend on-the-job, it stands to reason that our happiness must be strongly linked to the quality of our work environment and business relationships. If we’re routinely unhappy doing what we do for a living, it’s a sure sign that these external components are unhealthy and stacked against us.

This is the underlying message of Alexander Kjerulf’s CSM commentary on cultivating happiness at work.

According to Kjerulf, it’s the norm for U.S. workers to be dissatisfied with their jobs. That’s because managers and employees alike fail to make workplace happiness a priority. This isn’t a gosh, well, I guess that’s too bad fact of life. As Kjerulf puts it: “Hating your job is not an inconvenience, it's a serious problem. It can cause stress and depression. Ultimately, it can kill you.”

Lawyers should be acutely aware of the seriousness of this issue. As Sue Shellenbarger (pdf) writes in an article on Lawyers Opening Up About Depression, studies have found that about “19% of lawyers suffer depression at any given time, compared with 6.7% of the population as a whole.” While some might question the exact correlation between career stresses and depression, it seems that it’s well accepted that the “practice of law, with constant conflict and billing pressures, can take a toll.”

Attorney Daniel Lukasik contacted me last week to let me know about a website he’s launched to support himself and other lawyers who are living and coping with the day-to-day realities of depression. I checked it out and it presents as a terrific and much-needed resource.

For another perspective on lawyers and depression, Stephanie West Allen points us to a new book exploring the “benefits of negative emotions” and “how we might view depression in a more constructive way.”

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Kevin O’Keefe and Carolyn Elefant , among other bloggers, recently posted about this New York Times piece on the diminishing lure of the law. I read the article when it first ran and liked it a lot. But, the news it imparted was not earth shattering by any stretch.

For years, theorists, academics and others have been decoding and commenting on the root causes of lawyer discontent and attrition. When legal sanity launched in 2004, one of its main objectives was to highlight their work and related efforts to remedy an ailing legal profession. Since then, coverage here has included posts on:

• the antidote for lawyer discontent
• the economics of lawyer depletion 
• connecting points for employee engagement 
• wake up calls for lawyers and law firms 
• toxic law firms
  

Threading through the broader conversation about life in the law today – and echoed in the New York Times article - is the realization that the legal profession is out of step with larger social-cultural-generational shifts towards creative personal and business pursuits. You can sample some of the discussion on the new “Creative Age” through these posts:

• working with meaning
• lawyers in the conceptual age 
• the brave new world of law 
• are you untouchable?
  

The lingering question for law firms and practitioners alike is how to bring more creativity to the everyday practice of law. The first step, of course, is to acknowledge the creativity deficit and the problems deriving from it. From there, firms could take it to the people and ask their lawyers what kind of creative outlets and opportunities they’d like to have on the job. Beyond getting this direct input, firms could demonstrate their commitment to creativity through policy and marketing initiatives.

For some inspiration, firms can look to resources like this article on creativity and success (emphasizing the “simple and wonderful truth that all people have the capacity to be creative”) and this terrific marketing-lateral recruiting campaign from Chicago’s Ungaretti & Harris.

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Environmental sustainability. In recent years, it’s become a big wheel of an issue with multiple spokes - from climate change and fossil fuels to the greening of Wal-Mart and the upside of buying local.

Many businesses are pursuing policies, programs and initiatives that help them operate in environmentally responsible ways. But, there’s another kind of sustainability problem that remains largely unrecognized and untreated, especially in law firms. It’s the environmental threat that comes from having a disgruntled and disengaged workforce.

I’ve addressed this point before in posts on:

• the new law firm environmentalists 
• toxic law firms 
• organizational disrespect in the law 
• dealing with difficult people
  

The nexus between business sustainability and employee engagement is brilliantly illustrated in this video from McDaniel Partners (tipped at Be Excellent).

Law firm leaders can also gain insight into managing the employee experience from reader questions and expert answers shared at Office-Politics. I’m an advisor to the site, which was recently featured in the New York Times.

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We all know people who address a problem by researching it from a hundred different angles. They learn about its origins, offshoots and all known and potential solutions.

But, once they’re armed with this arsenal of information, they freeze up; they can’t move from their place of intellectual understanding into action. Instead, they retreat under the guise of needing more input or a better strategy.

For several years, I’ve been following surveys and other reports on associate contentment and attrition. The wants and needs of associates have been scrutinized along gender, generational, economic and other lines.

Here’s a core sampling of some recent coverage on the subject:

The ABA Journal’s What Associates Want offers a synopsis of a Hildebrandt executive summary on associate satisfaction and morale (pdf).

The Legal Times, via Law.com, outlines Why Associates Bail Out of Law Firm Life and what firms can do to anticipate attrition and prepare for its impact

A bit of the bigger picture comes through this overview of a survey on work/life balance and this take on an employee engagement study.

Given the wealth of information available to law firm management and HR teams, the question remains: Are firms stuck in the information-mining process or are they acting on the data to benefit their current and future associates?

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Torts. Mold. Waste. Lawyers are no strangers to the subject of toxicity. But, when we consider such noxious forces, it’s easy to overlook some of the most pervasive ones: the people we work with.

I’ve previously written about difficult people in law firms and organizational disrespect in the law. Seth Godin offers his take on the subject in companion posts on toxic employees and toxic bosses. In both, Godin highlights the role that leaders can play in fostering, controlling and remediating workplace toxins. He sums it up well when he states: “Because bosses are often able to define reality, at least for those in their sphere of influence, they can cause whole sections of an organization to go off the rails.”

If you think that complaining is the best way to deal with our toxic coworkers and firm leaders, think again. According to the Chief Happiness Officer, our complaints only make the workplace more toxic. That’s because complaining quickly goes viral, stems innovation and fuels bad relationships.

One possible antidote to this kind of toxicity is positive leadership. Business coach and speaker Anna Farmery highlights this point through a touching personal anecdote about the value of recognition. She aptly conveys how genuinely recognizing people for their efforts and achievements increases positive energy and reduces negative energy in virtually any situation or environment.

For more insight into the dynamics of toxic law firms, you can check out Jean Lipman-Blumen's book, The Allure of Toxic Leaders.

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In a previous post about innovation and the legal profession, I said: “With the imminent wave of Baby Boomer retirements, it’s time for law firms to innovate – to adapt their business environment, model and practices to meet the needs and demands of the young associates who support firm leaders today and who will (hopefully) become firm leaders in the future.”

My commentary there focused on innovating to benefit the youngest stratum of the law firm workforce. A very different perspective is offered in the current issue of The Complete Lawyer (TCL), which focuses on the graying of lawyers.

According to the issue’s lead in, a quarter of a million practicing lawyers in America are 55 or older and that number will triple in the next two decades. TCL’s contributors consider the implications of this shift from multiple vantage points. But a unifying message is that law firms can’t ignore the impact of this trend on their business model (tip to Matt Homann), dynamic and culture.

While there are certain economic issues to consider, there are also some very pressing human (as in humanity, not human resource) issues for firms – and the entire legal profession - to take on.

For more insight into innovation and the law, visit the College of Law Practice Management’s website for an introduction to the just-announced 2007 InnovAction award winners.

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Over the last few years, I’ve written quite a bit about the breakdown of the lawyer-client relationship and the resulting discontent and attrition. My coverage includes posts on:

• client experience management

• evangelizing legal service delivery

• re-booting the lawyer-client relationship

• fixing the legal professions broken windows

The last post on this list refers to a business application of the Broken Windows Theory. The theory holds that companies should place a premium on identifying and quickly repairing their broken windows – those aspects of their operation that signal an indifference to consumer satisfaction. By all reports, the law firm-client relationship window is still broken.

For some time, blogger Patrick Lamb has examined the law’s Lake Wobegon Effect, which he describes as “the phenomenon by which law firms always overestimate the degree to which their clients are satisfied.” He updates his study in a post reporting the results of a new General Counsel survey. According to Lamb, the survey shows that law firms continue to overrate their legal services and underestimate their clients’ dissatisfaction.

So, the question persists: How can law firm’s fix their client service problems?

Like any pervasive issue, the first step is to lift the blinds and admit that something is wrong. That isn’t easy for service providers to do, as evidenced by this article titled CEOs Think that Customer Service is Great (tip to Bryan Eisenberg) and this one describing the Top 10 Reasons Why Customer Service Fails. Unfortunately, the admission often comes only in the wake of a major service lapse or client departure.

Once the problem is out in the open, the next step is to cure it. Some law firms are indirectly appeasing disgruntled clients by switching to a performance-based or two-tier approach to associate compensation. Firms can also use an array of client feedback programs to improve their services. But, as many observers point out, it’s difficult to create a service model that begets client evangelists without consistently listening to your clients and sharing their feedback with the entire firm.

Over at Legal Business Development, Jim Hassett offers lists of 34 questions for clients and prospects and 24 more questions for current clients. Together, they make a great starting point for firms looking to engage clients in an ongoing, candid dialogue about the state of their legal services

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Most observers would agree that it makes sound business sense for law firms to establish strong and enduring relationships with the lawyers they hire and the clients they serve. But, what happens when one of these relationships is forged at the other’s expense? This is the scenario Gerry Riskin alludes to in a recent post titled “Genius” minus “empathy” equals “stupidity."

In it, Riskin cites the fallout that occurs when General Counsel are left out of the conversation about rising associate salaries in the law firms they use. He also directs us to a related post on Demand Destruction in which Patrick Lamb reports on GC’s negative responses to survey questions about law firm associate pay. While the survey results can be framed in terms of economic forces and market impact, Lamb astutely points out that law firms making such unilateral salary decisions “are putting their client relationships at risk”

And, so, firms are faced with competing -- instead of symbiotic -- business relationships.

On the one hand, they need to attract and retain top talent. Money, although not the only draw, still woos the best and brightest through a firm’s front door (whether it keeps them there is another story). On the other hand, a growing league of clients doesn’t want to foot the bill for law firm associate recruitment and retention initiatives.

It’s a conundrum.

Clients like the GC survey respondents have the choice to opt out and establish relationships with other (perhaps, smaller) firms or with alternative service providers like Axiom Legal. Beyond cutting back on lawyer pay increases and partner profits, law firms might do some relationship damage control by following Riskin’s advice to directly and candidly communicate with clients about associate compensation and other important issues.

Postscript: I finished writing this post late last night. This morning, law.com features a story about Sun Microsystem’s decision to reduce the number of law firms it uses as outside counsel. Although the company wouldn’t discuss the basis for its cuts, its General Counsel did share that Sun’s business interest in cost-cutting is at odds with the law firm “race to meet New York associate salary standards."

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Following up on my last post about enhancing the lawyer-law firm relationship, I read Bruce MacEwen’s recent commentary that highlights the difference between merely acknowledging relationship issues and addressing them. In a post titled “Our Lawyers Are Our Future:” But We Don’t Really Care, MacEwen writes that many firms declare their lawyers their most valuable assets, but few actually take steps to remedy problems like rampant associate attrition or the dearth of women partners.

Profiling the remedial action plan of one firm, Simmons & Simmons, MacEwen concludes that economics and “cognitive dissonance” will eventually compel other firms to similarly experiment with lawyer experience management.

Over at The Adventure of Strategy, Rob Millard refers us to a post by Nixon Peabody’s HR Director, William Simpson, captioned To make an Organization Great, First Make it a Great Place to Work. In it, Simpson details his firm’s ongoing, multi-pronged approach to optimizing the law firm-lawyer relationship. One of those prongs is examining “what drives employee satisfaction.” Among the satisfaction-drivers of Nixon Peabody’s lawyers are: meaningful work, recognition in the form of a timely and simple thank you, respect from management and communication.

This kind of dialogue about lawyer satisfaction can go a long way towards countering the dissatisfaction and defection that costs firms on many levels. As Rees Morrison states in this post about lawyers’ perception of workload, it’s “the mind-numbing, commodity work that does not draw fully on the lawyer’s talents and professional interests that demoralize[s] them” and compels complaints.

Firms wishing to engage their lawyers in a candid conversation about satisfaction-drivers might benefit from using the newest version of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder assessment. John Moore has a nice review of it at Brand Autopsy. On the flip side, a Q & A piece featuring Judge Carl Horn III will help lawyers refresh their recollection of what it means to live a satisfying life in the law (thanks to Susan Daicoff for the tip).

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I regularly visit the topic of fostering change in the legal profession. Last week, I questioned whether law firms can change to meet the demands of the next generation of practitioners. I suggested that some firms will step up to that challenge, while others will turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the telltale signs that their business model needs updating.

Change (the kind that comes peacefully and without overthrow) can occur on a cultural level only if the change drivers are speaking up and the establishment is listening. There needs to be a welcomed, open and constructive dialogue as well as a willingness and capacity to change. When all these components converge, there’s a ripe opportunity for positive change. There may be resisters, but that’s par for the course of any major shift.

As my previous post on the subject conveyed, the incoming cohort of lawyers can identify the workplace changes it seeks. Accustomed to speaking their mind, these new lawyers are likely more than willing to talk to firm leaders about those changes. The open question is whether law firm leaders can and want to listen up; especially when the status quo is serving them extremely well (as blogger Carolyn Elefant highlights, over half of the Am Law 100 firms just reported that their average partner compensation exceeds $1million).

Some firms recognize that firms, clients and lawyers all benefit when junior associates regularly share their thought processes with senior attorneys. But, other firms do their best to perpetuate a culture of silence, as Bruce MacEwen details in a great post called Do You Know What Your Associates Think?

According to MacEwen, “abrupt, truculent, holier-than-Thou” and adversarial by nature, law firm leaders tend to create a widespread fear of speaking up in their firms. It’s difficult to change from such a fear-based culture to one “open or conducive to speaking up.” MacEwen surmises that the key change driver is leader behavior.

I agree that, ideally, leaders should be part of the change effort. But, they’re not essential change agents. As I’ve stated before, when the new generation of lawyers takes a stronger foothold in the profession, evolution will start disfavoring firms -- and law firm leaders -- that ignore their needs in favor of a culture of silence.

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I’ve written a few posts describing lawyers as user-innovators -- the front-line (and, perhaps, most important) consumers, challengers and creators of their firm’s business culture. I’ve also posed the related inquiry: What would law firms look like if they considered their lawyers a potential community of user-innovators and actively nurtured that potential? What positive shifts in the firm’s environment, service model, and employee commitment and morale would result?

If we take in the data presented by objective observation, blogosphere dialogue and mainstream media coverage, it’s clear that our world and profession are experiencing clarion calls to change. The change drivers at the macro level take the form of environmental crises, global conflicts and widespread deprivations of human rights. On the micro level, there’s the emergent generation of people who are unwilling to devote years, let alone a lifetime, to meaningless work. Whether you label them Generation Y, The Millennials or Echo Boomers, this cohort of workers born in or after 1978 are coming to the service professions with expectations and values that challenge the status quo.

Some law firms respond to the call to change with a resounding: “Hey, this is what the law and law firm life is all about. If you’re looking for meaning and the easy road through, here’s the door. Leave the firm, leave the law, it’s up to you, but we’re not changing.” Other firms, however, see that their business model needs updating to meet the changing needs of present and future lawyers. They understand that the problems they’re having with retention, attrition and succession are harbingers of a growing misfit between the firm’s environment and the people that inhabit it.

Change is an inevitable part of life. Sometimes we refuse to do it until we’re sufficiently jolted by an event or experience that leaves us with no other choice. After meeting and talking to Harvard law students last week, I’m more convinced than ever that the time is ripe for law schools and law firms to welcome and engage the conversation about changes they need to make to sustain the legal profession into the future. There are plenty of current and pending lawyers who are ready, willing and able to share their ideas and insights on the issue.

Since I’m being asked to develop and present more programs for law students and young practitioners, I’ve gathered a list of articles and commentary on the next generation of lawyers and what they’re seeking in the workplace. Feel free to share your thoughts after you look through them:

Gen Y Lawyers on Career/Life Balance

Gen Y Lawyers Shunning Big Law

The Gen Y Equation

The Young and the Restless

You Say You Want a Big-Law Revolution

Who Says Being a Lawyer Has to Suck?

Re-Designing the Career Ladder

Call Them Gen Y or Millennials: They Deserve Our Attention

Making Work Work for Gen Y

Bridging the Generational Divide

One of the most interesting and telling perspectives comes from Brazen Careerist contributor Ryan Healy. In a post for the blog’s Twentysomething feature titled I’m in 17th Grade, he describes how he’s come to see the first years of business life as a learning lab. He captures it best when he writes: “I try to learn something from everything I do. This so-called 17th grade is just what it sounds like – an educational opportunity for me to master before I graduate to the next phase of my life or the next “grade.” What that grade will be, I have no idea, but I hope to figure it out while I’m here.”

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In preparing for an upcoming Harvard Law School program, I was reminded that today’s students are much more discerning consumers of information and ideas than they were back in my day. They take nothing at face value. And, thanks to the era of instant gratification, you must be prepared to capture their attention in just a few sound bites. If you don’t capture it, or if you otherwise fail to meet their consumer needs and expectations, they’ll check out on you, figuratively and, often, literally.

Although I enjoy engaging the energy brought by this new generation of lawyers, my guess is that it will present big issues for law firms built on a be quiet and pay your dues model of employee retention. I’ve previously discussed how the pay more, bleed more approach to law firm management and sustainability is flawed because fewer and fewer incoming lawyers will be willing to sacrifice the quality of their present lives for the possibility of a future partnership (especially when they can so readily see the personal toll that the partnership track takes on many firm leaders).

Penelope Trunk echoes this point in a post called Paying dues is so old school. She writes that, while people in leadership positions think that it’s important, “[p]aying one’s due is an antiquated idea in a workplace where few people aspire to climb the same corporate ladder for 45 [or, as in the law, even eight or nine] years. There’s simply no incentive to stick around and toil away in the hopes of one day attaining a life that seems rather lifeless.

Just as the up-and-coming generation of lawyers will likely shun dues paying as a viable business tenet, they’ll also refuse to tolerate any jerks they encounter in their law firms. Back in October, I wrote about Robert Sutton’s much-discussed book, The No Asshole Rule. Bruce MacEwen continues the conversation with a terrific post called The Care & Feeding of 800 Pound Gorillas. In it, he points out that, to date, the legal profession has largely tolerated “the jerks and a**holes in our firms” despite the morale sapped, loyalty eroded and careers derailed as a direct result. He also aptly notes that, while being a jerk may be contagious, each of us has the power and opportunity to stem the spread of this disease.

I agree with MacEwen. And I venture that, as the new generation of lawyers takes its foothold in the profession, the jerks and worse among us – and the firms that harbor them - will find themselves losing out due to natural selection.

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If you regularly stop by here, you’ve likely noticed that I devote a lot of blog posts and other professional space to exploring the topic of human energy and how it factors into our ability to create successful business relationships and avoid unsuccessful ones. This is much more than an academic interest for me.

For close to 25 years, I’ve tried my best to keep good company; that is, to surround myself as much as possible with positive people as opposed to negative people who drain the heck out of me. In any situation, I’m vigilant of the energetic influences around me and monitor whether I’m experiencing them as filling or draining. Of course, as a practicing lawyer and mediator, steering clear of negativity has been a big challenge. And I’ve noticed that, where negative people and positive people co-mingle, the negative energy usually ends up trumping and stifling the positive to a large extent.

Given my interest and observations about negativity and positivity, I was captivated by a terrific post from Chief Happiness Officer Alexander Kjerulf on happiness and workplace productivity. Starting with the premise that “happiness at work is the #1 productivity booster,” Kjerulf shares 10 reasons why this is the case. Topping the list is this point:

Happy people are a lot more fun to be around and consequently have better relations at work. This translates into:

• Better teamwork with your colleagues
• Better employee relations if you’re a manager
• More satisfied customers if you’re in a service job
• Improved sales if you’re a sales person

In making the case for the happiness-productivity connection, Kjerulf (who, by the way, has a book on the topic called Happy Hour is 9 to 5 that you can buy or read online for free) points us to a related post by one of my favorite bloggers, Kathy Sierra. Hopping over to her space, I read her take on how Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain.

In it, Sierra provides scientific backing – neuroscience, to be exact – for the finding that negativity tends to be contagious. Specifically, she writes, due to the phenomenon of emotional contagion, “negative emotions exert a more powerful effect in social situations than positive ones.” That’s why a generally happy and upbeat person will likely become depressed or angry when hanging out with someone who’s depressed or angry. According to a source Sierra quotes, the converse is also true: If we’re around someone who’s self-confident and buoyant long enough, we’re likely to feel good about ourselves.

For more on the impact of negativity around us, tune in to Anna Farmery’s podcast on Managing Negativity at Work. For more on the intersection of neuroscience and business, check out the archived posts at Stephanie West Allen’s idealawg. West Allen has also written a couple of recent posts on two of my favorite subjects to cover at legal sanity: energy and self-esteem at work.

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In a post called Lawyer unhappiness: Chicken Little at law, Stephanie West Allen highlights Robert Ambrogi’s recent reference to a chain of commentary about scholarly work on the subject of lawyer happiness. The chain backtracks from West Allen to Ambrogi to Jeff Lipshaw at the Legal Profession Blog to John Steele from the Legal Ethics Forum.

I enjoyed reading about the studies (and the bloggers’ perspectives on them) and wasn’t surprised to learn that they’ve yielded some inconsistent conclusions.

Over the years, I've discussed the topic of lawyer happiness and unhappiness from many different angles at legal sanity. If you want to conduct a study on satisfied lawyers, you'll find enough of them to gather data on. If you want to study lawyer discontent, you'll find plenty of empirical fodder for your consideration.

To add a different perspective, practitioners (especially newly-minted ones), law firm leaders, law students and their educators would benefit from a new study delineating the specific factors and forces (such as meaning, money, employee engagement initiatives, leadership, client interaction, and flex-time work options) that make or break lawyer happiness today.

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I’ve devoted quite a bit of blog space to discussing how lawyers can optimize their business relationships. As I’ve repeatedly observed, success in the law largely turns on the quality of our work relationships. When our client connections are impaired, we experience the fallout in the form of client discontent and defection and our own unhappiness and depletion.

A group of articles I recently gathered together for an upcoming program on Relationships for Business Success (PDF) got me thinking about the modern-day version of human-to-human connection and how it impacts lawyers endeavoring to build and sustain business.

Cultivating successful client relationships requires a kind of intimacy – a willingness to get to know the human being behind the legal issue or need that comes across our desk. It’s basically the same kind of intimacy that fuels healthy connections to family and friends. But, according to some observers, the tools that many of us have come to depend on for everyday connectivity may be compromising our capacity for intimacy.

In a Forbes.com article on PDAs (as in personal digital assistants) and intimate relationships, one expert describes this kind of wireless technology as “the modern-day equivalent to the spinster chaperone.” Although they appear to boost relationships by providing users access to one another 24/7, the kind of interactions PDAs facilitate are generally quick and impersonal. As these “nanosecond communications” become the norm for us, we expect “instant relationships as well as all other kinds of instant gratification.”

If we lift our eyes from the BlackBerry screen for a minute or two, it becomes very clear that this expectation doesn’t play out well in the real world of human connection.

This WSJ.com article on BlackBerry Orphans recently made the rounds among my friends and family. While some of the quotes from kids dealing with PDA-obsessed parents are funny, the sentiments behind the words are powerful and hard to ignore (and I speak from personal experience here). These kids are expressing a real need for attention – they want to be more visible to their parents. But, at many points throughout the day, they’re largely invisible because their parents have exchanged intimacy for constant connectivity.

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In my last post on the new law firm environmentalists, I mentioned research findings that burnout within a business or organization really reflects more on the employer than the employee. Picking up on this idea is a recent Knowledge at Wharton article discussing how Lack of Organizational Respect Fuels Employee Burnout [thanks to Susan Abbott for the tip].

According to the piece, respect is critical to inducing or avoiding burnout because it fuels employee engagement in the workplace. Respect gives people the conviction that what they’re doing is important and meaningful. Conversely, when employees experience disrespect directly or vicariously through coworkers, they conclude that the company doesn’t care about its workers and demoralization follows.

Law firms experiencing the fallout from employee burnout need to examine their culture of respect. If it’s lacking – with disrespect being the prevailing cultural norm --- they’d be well-advised to embrace the leadership advice contained in an article offering Five Steps to Engaging Your Employees [flagged by George Ambler and the folks at Be Excellent].

In it, respected business advisor Ram Charan points out these self-evident truths: A “leader who creates the right ambiance and kindles the fire in people gets that extra something that drives organizations to new heights. [ ] Great leaders understand the numbers, but they also touch people's hearts.”

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Lawyer burnout is a topic I’ve repeatedly covered here from various angles. We all know that this kind of career-fueled depletion is not exclusive to the practice of law. It occurs across a range of professions and industries. But, the hard truth is that lawyer burnout is so pervasive that it’s become the functional equivalent of an environmental hazard – law firms will not be able to sustain themselves if they don’t do something to cap and abate the rampant lawyer depletion in their ranks.

Knowing that this is a subject of great interest to me, my friend and fellow lawyer David Abeshouse directed me to a New York Magazine issue focused on the science of burnout. In an excellent cover story titled Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Jennifer Senior chronicles the evolving study of career burnout, from its roots in the “caring professions” of the 1970s to its affliction of the best and brightest in today’s buttoned-up corporate culture.

One of the most interesting points the article makes is that we’re often told that each of us – as an individual – is responsible for monitoring and dealing with our own burnout. Yet, researchers have found that this push to self-help misses the mark because burnout within a business or organization really “says more about the employer than it does about the employee.” So, it makes sense that new burnout studies are focusing on workplace environmental factors that cause and alleviate this kind of employee depletion.

Interestingly, the piece highlights this factoid concerning the legal profession: “Of the 75 law firms surveyed in New York in The American Lawyer’s recent survey of mid-level associates, the firms ranked No. 1 (Dickstein Shapiro) and No. 3 (Patterson Belknap) had one thing in common: They both received perfect scores on their attitudes toward pro bono work.”

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In a very candid and provocative post, David Maister asks Are We Too Negative? This query stems from Maister’s observation that many blogs, including his own, focus on people’s flaws. Specifically, he notes:

“When you go visit other blogs, you see lots of criticism, complaints, cynicism and skepticism. You only see a very little praise and celebration of successes, triumphs and things done right. For every blog post or comment illustrating excellence, creativity, trustworthiness or professionalism, there are multiples bemoaning the lack of these things.”

The post has elicited a lengthy comment thread that’s well worth a read. What occurs to me after considering the commentary is that there’s really no point in being negative and self-flagellating about all this negativity. Rather, just calling it out is a positive step because it opens the door to a much-needed dialogue on what’s ailing the legal profession.

Like the larger culture, our profession is plagued by rampant pessimism that’s reinforced by heavy doses of bad news delivered daily by media outlets and firm leaders. Through my training and development work, I’ve come to see how this unhealthy diet of negativity has left many practitioners depleted and hungering for positive filling. They’re searching for some meaning at work and beyond.

This drive to redress negativity with an infusion of meaning and filling has deep roots. It’s the focus of famed psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, “which identifies the search for a meaning in life as the primary motivational force in human beings." It’s also addressed by the field of Positive Organizational Scholarship. And, at the law firm level, the need to avoid depletion and gain positive energy is reflected in the rise of employee engagement initiatives.

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Since posting about women in the law yesterday, I ran across a FC Now blog post addressing How Working Mothers Find Work/Life balance. It poses this provocative question: “can a woman work hard enough to succeed in her career without coming across as a negligent mother?”

The post refers to a Novemebr 1, 2006 New York Times piece titled Working Mothers Find Some Peace on the Road. Among many other points of interest, that article offers the following observation: “as hard as it can be to balance the demands of business trips and family life, for the relatively small group of employed mothers who travel, it [solo business travel] can be delicious.”

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted a roundup of sources addressing the legal profession’s gender gap. This post made for an interesting companion piece to my prior commentary on the feasibility of flex-time work in the law.

The more I speak with women lawyers participating in my Legal Sanity Learning Programs, the more convinced I am that firms are missing out on opportunities to listen to, engage and empower this vital population.

The cyber space is home to a vibrant and very candid conversation about the struggles and triumphs of women in the law and the larger workforce. What follows is just a sampling of the online dialogue that’s been generated in the short time since my last post on the subject. 

Over at Amazing Firms Amazing Practices, Gerry Riskin points to a recent survey (pdf) confirming that women are under-represented in the top tiers of our profession and play a less extensive role in law firm governance. The survey also found evidence of a compensation gap between female equity partners and their male counterparts. An article featured at law.com augments this discussion by sharing what several women lawyers had to say about the survey and its implications.

Lending a slightly different perspective to the topic is another law.com piece asserting that Women Hold the Keys to Their Success. It opens with this very upbeat assertion: “The keys to success are to create a supportive environment that allows time to focus on what has to be done and how it can be done best: to nurture relationships, build a team to support the endeavor and enjoy.” As the above survey connotes, however, the task of creating a truly “supportive environment” for women within a law firm culture may be a much more formidable challenge than this well-meaning article lets on.

Lawjobs.com also weighs in on the conversation with a very interesting article on law firm efforts to rehire alumni. A “dearth of minority and women attorneys in the upper echelon of big firms” is among the reasons cited for the rise in alumni programs aimed at “bringing back attorneys who leave for perceived greener pastures.”

Placing the subject in broader context is a csmonitor.com piece offering The truth behind women ‘opting out.' The coverage concerns two reports citing “a weak labor market and inflexible work policies as the main reasons women are staying home.” Some additional insight is provided by a CareerJournal.com article in which executive coaches offer tips on Grooming Women for the Top.

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All of us in the law have dealt with difficult coworkers. The resulting drain on our personal energy stores can be immense. The deep holes that spates of difficult people punch in a law firm’s culture often go ignored and unfilled. In the wake of this inaction, firms lose lawyers, clients and business repute.

John Moore at Brand Autopsy sent me on a blog-a-thon of sorts with a clever post on this theme. Titled the The No Asshole Rule, the post refers to the soon-coming book by the same name in which author Robert Sutton discusses the business damage that difficult people wreak.

From Moore’s commentary, I headed over to Guy Kawasaki’s blog  for his great review of Sutton’s book. I then took in a May 2004 article by Sutton called Nasty People. From there, it was on to David Maister who adds his perspective on the subject by asking us all to consider times when we might have taken the plunge and acted like the proverbial hole in the doughnut.

This ride around the Web naturally ends right here at home. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a regular contributor to an online help site called Office-Politics, which just underwent a sweet redesign. You’ll find lots of good information and insight there on navigating the toxic workplace.

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Some time back, I wrote about an ongoing cyber dialogue on gender gap issues in the law fueled by a New York Times article questioning Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms? That article featured the opinion and work of Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a law firm partner and author of the book Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law.

I recently met Rikleen when we presented programs at the same ALM conference. She was gracious enough to forward me a copy of her book and I just started reading it. Even at first blush, it’s fair to say that Rikleen offers fresh, thorough and well-written commentary on a subject that’s critical to the future of our profession.

If you want some additional insight into Rikleen’s research and findings, she’s interviewed and otherwise profiled in the Spring 2006 issue of the Women Lawyers Journal (pdf).

Providing some more food for thought on this front is a washingtonpost.com piece called Working Mom Top Fears. It conveys some telling information culled from a recent AFL-CIO Ask A Working Woman survey (pdf). The steps companies are taking to prevent or allay such fears are set out in a CareerJournal.com article on The Mommy Drain. Completing this roundup is lawyer Karen Asner’s incisive take on Creating Win-Win Flexible Work Arrangements.

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My 5-year-old son is a mega fan of the Transformers toys and television show. For all of you in the dark about these “robots in disguise,” you’ll find a nice overview here. These aren’t your standard-issue machines fighting the ultimate battle of good vs. evil. They’re “more than meets the eye” in many ways. Primarily, they stand out because they experience and project the full gamut of human emotions – they’re passionate and dedicated warriors who think and feel deeply. A fusion of the robust and robotic gives these characters their mass appeal.

Blogger Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users picks up and runs with the robotic-robust theme in a post called Knocking the exuberance out of employees. In it, she questions why some companies pursue a mode of management that kills off employee energy and excitement (along with their “desire to learn, grow, adapt, innovate, and care") and breeds automatons.

Sierra comes up with a brilliant, 16-point list of reasons why many managers believe that “Robots Are the Best Employees.” I won’t reiterate the whole roster. But here’s a snapshot of its contents. Managers prefer robots because robots (as opposed to robust humans): “have no strongly-held opinions; have no passion, so they have nothing to "fight" for; are always willing to do whatever it takes (insane hours, etc.); never make the boss look bad (e.g. stupid, incompetent, clueless, etc.); and don't need ‘personal’ days ... because they don't have a personal life.”

Firms recognizing the dangers inherent in fostering mechanical employees can look to the wisdom that John Moore shares in a recent post on Aligning the Employee Experience with the Customer Experience. Drawing from his book, Tribal Knowledge, Moore states that “creating meaningful employee experiences revolves around making the company something employees can believe in.” He goes on to posit that the best companies (you can sub in law firms) “realize that happy, knowledgeable employees will usually translate into happy, knowledgeable customers.”

Those of us wishing to proactively avoid robotic employment will benefit from the guidance Jim Citrin  offers in an article compelling us to consider the fit of any job we apply for. Towards the end of the piece, Citirn identifies the underpinnings of job contentment as an “environment of trust, a person or people with whom you enjoy spending time, feeling at home in the workplace, [and] relationships that nourish you.”

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About a year ago, I took a business and personal empowerment course that - among other significant lessons – taught me how to take action in the face of uncertainty, fear and negativity. One of the course mottos that I’ve embraced as my own is “ready, fire, aim.” It’s my reminder that the changes I seek in my business only happen when I stop pondering and talking about them, and start acting on my ideas and intuition.

The notion that action speaks louder than words is embedded in a thoughtful post by Thom Singer  called Thinking Too Much ??? In it, he recounts how one lawyer he knew invested so much time and energy in weighing the details of a marketing plan that “he spent no time doing.” A similar cautionary message runs through a lawfirmblogging.com post titled Don’t Argue Over Where To Put The Unicorns. It relates what happens when we become so fixated on the possible results and implications of a project that – “dwelling on what could possibly, remotely, maybe, potentially happen” – we become frozen in our tracks.

Considering the same subject from a slightly different angle is a Brains on Fire post about Control Issues. Although many business people crave control and believe they have it, the post notes, control is just an illusion. An illusion and obsession that keeps us from seizing opportunities for real business progress. To lift this veil and embrace reality, we’re given this no-nonsense instruction: “quit thinking about it. Talking about it. Having meetings about meetings about. Or pretending to do it when you aren’t acutally [sic] doing it. Just freakin’ do it.”

For many lawyers, the task of getting unstuck and taking action is easier to accomplish with the help of a mentor or other trusted advisor. This is a point I covered in a recent post on positive law firm leadership. You’ll find David Maister’s recap of, and commentary on, that post among others he’s culled for a very insightful Blawg Review #76.

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A New York Times editorial on The Rise of Pessimism in our country caught my attention because it echoes much of the statistics and understanding lawyer life coach Ellen Ostrow shares in an informative and comprehensive interview she gives in The Complete Lawyer (hat tip to Stephanie West Allen of idealawg).

Addressing whether lawyers are healthy, Ostrow cites study findings that “the most successful law students were the most pessimistic. And it’s the most successful law students who are going into the big firms.” She goes on to link profession-wide pessimism to “depression